Three Sides of Life
by KesAFloyd
Summary: COMPLETE, sequel to "Son of the One and the One." David Sheridan's daughter Caroline, Ivanova's reincarnation, becomes unstuck in time and lives a life in a sad alternate universe, among other things.
1. Prologue, The First Side of Life

Prologue (The First Side of Life)  
  
It had to only be an idea to comfort him on the death of Susan, but the though had been creeping back into G'Kem's mind more and more every time he saw David and Stephanie's daughter Caroline. Was Caroline the next person in line to carry Susan Ivanova's soul, possibly her memories? Again, at first it had been a casual thought, just to ease the pain of Susan's death, but now, G'Kem began to seriously wonder.  
G'Kem hadn't seen David, Stephanie, and Caroline for three years. That was why he was overly excited when he rang the doorbell at their house.  
Stephanie opened the door. David was close behind her. Both of them hugged G'Kem and they stepped into the house.  
"I'm so glad you were able to come," Stephanie said.  
"Where's Caroline?" he asked.  
"In her room," David replied. He called to her. "Keeks, our friend's here. Remember we said he was coming?"  
The five year old appeared in the doorway. G'Kem had a momentary feeling that it was Susan, but he didn't think about that. But upon seeing G'Kem, the girl sauntered across the room, stumbled over nothing, and jumped in front of him.  
"G'Kem!" she shouted excitedly.  
"Hi Caroline."  
"Come see my room!" She grabbed his hand to follow her. For an instant he saw Susan in her eyes. She ran down the hallway, tripped twice, then disappeared into one of the rooms. G'Kem entered shortly after that.  
"Wow," he said, "You have a nice room. You're a good girl keeping it so clean."  
"I can't stand anything on the floor!" she said. Almost as if to demonstrate, her foot caught on a wrinkle in the rug and she lost her balance. She immediately picked herself up and jumped onto her bed.  
She showed him her stuffed animals, her clothes, and her little junky things that five year olds consider precious. Then she showed him her drawings.  
"These are really good!" he exclaimed, truly meaning it. It also surprised him what they were drawings of.  
"This Earthforce starship here, it doesn't rotate because it has Minbari gravity. But this station here," she pulled another drawing out of her drawer, "was built before the Minbari let the Humans use the gravity." She paused and looked embarrassed. "I kind of went out of the lines here."  
"It's good though. You have good detail."  
Caroline nodded. She took a white marker and drew over where the blue slipped outside the line.  
"Carrie, we'd like to talk to G'Kem too," her mother shouted from the other room.  
"Okay!" She turned to G'Kem. "Lets go into the living room."  
G'Kem followed Caroline, who tripped on the rug again. He sat down on the couch next to David. Caroline ran over to a shelf and pulled out a coloring book. She plunked down on the floor and opened to an uncolored page. She opened up her marker box.  
"Why does she keep tripping like that?" G'Kem asked.  
"We don't know," David said. "We've taken her to several doctors and orthopedic surgeons. No one has found anything wrong with her."  
Nothing could have prepared G'Kem for what happened next, but somehow he wasn't as surprised as Caroline's parents.  
The girl looked up from her coloring. "I'm okay," she asserted, "It's just that I forgot how to walk for so long." She said nothing else, and went back to her coloring.  
"What Keeks?" David asked.  
"I think I know what she means," G'Kem said, though he wasn't sure what it meant.  
  
"You think what!"  
"It really seems like that's the case," G'Kem explained.  
"But Susan died only a week before Caroline was born. How could they have the same soul?" David asked.  
"Susan was near death before Marcus Cole gave up his life for her back then. It's possible that a small piece of her soul left her there and Caroline got it when she was conceived, and the rest of it joined her when Susan died."  
"You know," David said, "As crazy as that sounds, I think I'll have to believe you. I mean Carrie draws Earthforce ships that she's never seen, talks about things that happened before her birth. I mean all of this could also be a very vivid imagination but after what she just said a few minutes ago- it just makes sense."  
"The family return phenomenon."  
"What?" David asked blankly.  
"Studies have shown that souls tend to return to the people that they're close to."  
"Oh... How do you know so much about this?"  
"David," he said slowly and clearly, "I study these things. That's my job. I'm a telepath hypnotist."  
"Yeah, yeah. Could you tell me any more? Is there anything else that supports this... theory?"  
"Well I don't know. I don't know much about Caroline. I only saw her once before today. Sometimes with reincarnation there's a physical aspect that gets transferred over- in theory, possibly, Caroline's walking balance problem and Susan's paralysis. Lets see... often someone shot to death in a past lifetime will have a birthmark that looks like a PPG wound. What? I'm just suggesting things here."  
"Birthmark..." David said. "Caroline has several birthmarks."  
"What kind?"  
"Stripes here, here and here." He drew a line on either side of his stomach, and one across his chest. "The exact same markings on her back. And then a spot on the inside of her right arm."  
G'Kem opened his eyes from a period of thought. "That's gotta be proof, David."  
"How?" he asked. "Are you sure you're not jumping to conclusions?"  
"I really don't think so. Susan had scars in those exact places. The ones on her stomach and back are from the nerve surgery she had. I think the one on her arm was from where a clip on the alien healing machine burned her."  
David was looking at G'Kem strangely. "Steph, could you come here a moment?" he called. 


	2. The Second Side of Life

The Second Side of Life  
  
Caroline Infante-Sheridan had a dream when she was fourteen years old. It started out like any other dream: silly, not quite real. But it started to build up coherence. She was on a planet. It looked like Earth. A man walked up to her.  
"Come with me," he said. He spoke a language that she didn't recognize, but that she somehow understood perfectly. He picked up her hand as if to lead her, and she saw him do this. It is said that looking at your hands in a dream will make the dream lucid. It did and as she gained self- consciousness, she lost the dream. It was like dream limbo--after one dream but before the next.  
The man was still there, and he led her into the gray fog. He led her into another dream. She reentered the place she had just seen. This time is was dusty, barely inhabitable, sad.  
"I want to show you what we're building here," the man said. "It's not all lost."  
Then she awoke. Each dream you ever have has an emotion unique to that night, and you never experience it again after that day. There was something sad about this dream, but with an undercurrent of enjoyability. Caroline rolled over, and fell back asleep. To her surprise, the dream returned.  
"It was a beautiful city, once, wasn't it?" the man asked. She nodded, not knowing what she was agreeing with. He led her into a settlement of ruined buildings, tents, and shacks that looked like they had been hastily built a long time ago. He turned around.  
"Don't you remember?" he asked her.  
Far back in her dream memory, she remembered. The feeling of sadness changed form. It was a feeling of the thirst of homesickness being quenched. That was her dream memory, not her real-life memory. In real life she didn't recognize the place in the slightest.  
Three young children ran up to her.  
"Ms. Ivanova! Is there going to be school tomorrow?" one of them asked. Funny that they would call her that. It was a dream reality, after all.  
She blinked. "I don't know," she said dumbly.  
She walked off, the man still beside her. She couldn't tell where she was going, but the dream drew her to a cabin. The door was open. She went in.  
"I'm really tired," she told him.  
She lay down on the mattress. Surprisingly, he lay down beside her. She fell asleep within the dream.  
  
When she awoke, sunlight was streaming in through the window, and she knew it was the next day. She rolled over and stretched, looking at the ceiling through half-closed eyes.  
"I don't want to go to school today," she grumbled, but kicked off her covers.  
"You'll really disappoint the kids, Susan."  
"What!" She focused on her surroundings. She was still in the cabin from the dream.  
"It's the first day of school. I'll assume that the teacher has to be there the first day."  
Unlike the fuzzy dream, this cabin was real. She could feel the roughness of the mattress, the hard of the wall next to her, the sun on her face, and she could feel the dust in her lungs. There was a cracked mirror hanging on the wall across the room. She ran over to it.  
All of one's life, one looks in the mirror to see the same person. The woman that looked back at Caroline was not herself. It was so shockingly alien, but she knew the face that she saw.  
She was not fourteen anymore. She looked mid-thirties. She was brown haired, gray-eyed, and not so tall. The clothes she wore were faded and thin. The dirt had been beaten out of them hundreds of times over. Like everything, she was fairly dusty. Like Narn after the Centauri occupation: dusty but dignified.  
She recognized the face instantly but not the surroundings in the slightest.  
"You know," she said, "I'm all screwed up this morning. When does school start?"  
"When the sun comes up over the building across the street."  
"You mean just whenever the sun happens to come up over the top of the building? That changes year round. Doesn't anyone have a clock or something around here?"  
"A clock! Are you dreaming again?" the man exclaimed. "Sure I have a clock!" He pulled a watch out of a dresser drawer. "Here's a clock." He tossed it to her.  
"This thing's broken."  
"What do you expect? Everything's broken around here! I'd think the time would be the least of your concerns."  
"What happened here?" she sighed.  
The man snorted. "Tell me about it."  
"That was a question."  
"Come on Susan just forget about it. Breakfast's almost done."  
Breakfast was a strange thing that looked like a cross between a loaf of bread and a sponge. She ate it without complaint.  
"I want to know what happened here," she said again.  
"You want my philosophical view?"  
She gave him a hard look.  
"We were damn stupid idiots to even go into space. Now look where it's got us."  
She sighed. No sense. No sense at all.  
She got up and looked outside.  
"Well I think the sun's pretty much over the building. I gotta get going."  
"Bye," he said, "Good luck with the kids."  
She stepped outside. A boy was walking past. She ran over to him.  
"You going to school?" she asked casually.  
"Yep!"  
"Mind if I walk with you?" Mind if I follow to see where you go, more like it.  
"Sure."  
"And your name is..."  
"Yevgine. You remember me from last year, don't you?" he demanded.  
"Oh yeah," she nodded, trying to act like she knew him.  
She was still trying to figure out what was going on. This was real. People spoke in words, not dream suggestions. She remembered being Susan Ivanova a long time ago, but she had never lived here, not in this city of ruins. From how old she looked, she supposed she was supposed to be in her mid-thirties, and that would make it the early 2260's.  
In the early 60's, she had been fighting the Shadow, Earth, and telepath wars, so this couldn't be real. In her memory, she had been an Earthforce officer on Babylon 5, with Captain Sheridan, Chief Garibaldi, Doctor Franklin, Minbari Ambassador Delenn, that bunch.  
"Oh Ms. Ivanova! My grandma gave this to me. It's a real history textbook, but you can have it. I can't read it. It's in English." He handed her a large book. She opened it up.  
"I studied English in school." More than you could imagine, Yevgine. More than you could imagine.  
"Thanks," she said.  
The boy ran into a rebuilt ruin that had the word "School" on it, written in Russian. She followed him in. Several other children were already seated behind wooden planks that served as desks. She walked up to the front of the classroom. She had often wanted to teach a class. Not students teaching teachers day, but to really have control. Now she wasn't quite sure what to do. She was only in the Minbari equivalent of ninth grade, after all.  
Soon the room was full. Everyone was quiet. She was startled. They were so eager to learn that they wanted to get going as soon as possible.  
On the one real piece of furniture in the room, a big desk, Caroline found a stack of dusty papers. One of them was a handwritten class roster on thick, handmade paper. She put the text book down and turned to the class.  
"Well, I'm glad that you could come today. I'll do roll call and see who's here."  
She began to read off the list of names.  
Some of the children looked as little as kindergarten, while others could have been as old as herself (as Caroline, not as Susan).  
She marked off each child with a piece of crumbly coal. She had rummaged around in the desk and found no pencils, no pens, nothing to write with except a stick of wood burnt until it was shiny and black.  
Apparently she had written the date at the top of the paper. September 10, 2259. Alright, she had the time, but not the slightest idea of where she was. Perhaps she had been doing a past-life exploration session and somehow skewed into a world of her own imagination? Unlikely. Her sessions were nothing like this, never becoming more than a clear memory. They were never physical like this.  
She looked out onto the faces of the children--the children that she was supposed to be one of--until yesterday, it seemed. They were all dressed like her. Their clothes were simple. Here and there one of them wore a piece of tarnished jewelry that seemed to glisten out of days long gone past. Of a better time? She saw in their eyes nothing of this. This life was all that they knew.  
She managed to wing it through the whole day, and gave a huge sigh of relief was the children ran out of school. She would have to think of something to do with them tomorrow. But for now, she put the history book and the papers into the desk and walked out. She found her way back to the house, memorizing each dirt street in case she didn't wake up back in her real home the next day.  
She looked around the one room. There was nothing. The man wasn't home. This was her chance. She opened up the top drawer of the dresser, which had a lot of personal items. She rummaged around. Like an archeologist, she tried to piece together what this life was all about.  
She found a pencil, and she would bring it to the class the next day. She picked up an identicard. It was Susan's (her own?), but the photo was outdated by at least fifteen years. Farther back in the drawer, she found another card. "Gari Delianov." It was the man, but he too in the photo was a late teenager. There was more stuff in the drawer--the kind of junk that only a person with few possessions would keep. Several paper clips, a pocket computer (she tested it, power source long since run out), a college application pamphlet, a couple of hair ties (not so stretchy anymore), a small picture book with a bookplate that identified itself in a child's handwriting as owned by Olga Sakharova, several odd-shaped rocks, the watch that she had seen earlier, and a photo of a golden hamster with "If" written on the back of it. She couldn't guess whether the hamster's name was If or someone had began to write a sentence but only wrote the first word.  
Caroline wondered where Gari had gone. She supposed it was a simple errand somewhere, or work, but that didn't give her any clues to where he was or when he was coming back.  
In the second drawer were clothes. Third drawer: more clothes. In the bottom drawer were several transparency sheets with lists of names and age/sex stats on them. She scanned the names and found that majority of people on it were teenagers and people in their early twenties, people in the prime of their lives, but there were also a good number of children and older people. There were many typos and missing information as if the list had been hastily drawn up.  
It all meant nothing to Caroline. She couldn't imagine what the list was for. It seemed very important, but important to whom? This was all too annoying. How was she supposed to function here if she didn't have a clue as to what was going on?  
She took the picture book out of top drawer and sat down on the mattress. She sat there for a long time, thinking, not really reading it, until she heard Gari's footsteps and he appeared pushed the door open.  
"Hey Susan, how'd the first day of school go?"  
"Fine."  
"Oh that's good. You know I was just over talking to the Prozorovskys. You must know that Feodor wasn't in school today. He said he wasn't feeling well. Seemed fine to me. Anyway, they've heard that a Ranger is coming sometime soon from western Europe."  
"Ranger?"  
"Yeah, you know the transcontinental messengers."  
"Oh. Yes. Of course," she stammered. Really, to pick that title.  
Gari sat down next to her.  
"Olga was a cute kid wasn't she?"  
Caroline said nothing.  
"I wish we could have cared for her better after she realized that her parents hadn't gotten onto the list."  
"List," she said. It wasn't a question, or an answer, just an acknowledgement.  
"That's why you went into teaching? I mean these kids. They don't know any world other than this. They have parents. They're more fortunate than us, Susan."  
"I had my father until I was an adult," she said, digging into her shadowy memory of Susan Ivanova's life, hoping it was the same here, wherever here was.  
"I wouldn't call seventeen an adult, Susan."  
"Seventeen?"  
"You told me that your mother and brother died and your father didn't make it underground before..." It was something almost too painful to speak, but everyone was expected to know what it was. "... before the boneheads broke the Line."  
  
Old St. Petersburg was a cold place in the wintertime. Gatherings of people built huge fires in the halls of the rebuilt old buildings, and celebrated the holidays. On new year's eve there was a large party which nearly the whole population of Old St. Petersburg attended. This added up to nearly four hundred people. Caroline watched this with silent wonderment. A city formerly with a population of millions was now a town of 400. It was amazing. All of these people were many of the few survivors of a planet-wide Armageddon. A time line which everyone had expected, but which never happened.  
Gari ran up to her and grabbed her wrists.  
"Come on, dance with me!" he said excitedly. He pulled her closer to the fire as people began singing a fast song.  
"Oh come on I can't dance," she said as he pulled her around in a circle.  
"Dance like you did on our wedding day," he shouted over the fast song.  
She wasn't sure how good a dancer this Susan was supposed to be but Caroline knew that she herself wasn't good. When she had been little, she had tripped over every little thing, but now she couldn't blame certain events in her past lives for just being a clumsy person.  
It didn't surprise her that Susan and Gari were married. They didn't wear rings, but they didn't own too much fancy stuff at all for that matter. The topic had never come up, and it had remained a slight mystery even after four years. Would she marry him if it were up to her? He was fun and thoughtful, but she was just a teenager in her mind. It would be years before she finally caught up with what people expected of a grown woman. She had worked hard to act grown up.  
What had she seen in these past four years? A voice from a dream that seemed so long ago now came back to her: "It's not all lost." And indeed she saw that all was not lost. These people lived as their ancestors did centuries ago, but with a flair for knowledge and the remembrance of a more technologically advanced time. There were things to be rediscovered--but people knew where and how to look already. She could even say they were enjoying life more, if it weren't the sadness and guilt of living while billions died. But where there wasn't guilt there was pride. The pride of carrying on the legacy of the human race. She saw the children, and she realized that they must not forget when their parents weren't there to remember for them.  
*Too late for any chance but one lying on a dead man!* something screamed in her mind. *Too late for anything or anyone but Jeffrey Sinclair!* Even in the fun, excited atmosphere of the hall, something allowed her mind one last scream of *Too late to save Ganya Ivanov! Too late for the Human race!*  
Caroline managed to break away from Gari, and she walked outside. She sat on one of the fallen trees. Could she still think of herself as Caroline after four years as Susan? Yes. She could never forget who she used to be.  
Feodor Prozorovsky walked up and sat next to her.  
"Susan, I'm worried."  
"What about?" she asked. He grunted, as if he was trying to decide what to say.  
"Susan, I have to tell you something. I have to say it because... well... I love you Susan."  
She was startled. He was twelve years old.  
"For how long?" she asked.  
"Longer than you could... ever imagine. You were always so much older than me."  
"In Valen's name," she murmured quietly to herself. It was a comfort to say that, so far away from Minbar.  
Feodor looked up. There was a look of bewilderment on his face.  
"Valen," he repeated. "That's what I'm worried about."  
"What?"  
The young man leaped up from where he sat.  
"Valen!" He stared at her. "We failed, Susan, we failed!"  
"Failed? Failed in what?"  
"Susan!" Feodor paced like a madman. "You know what I'm talking about. In Valen's name I know you know!" Then, as an afterthought, he added, "Caroline?"  
She stared into his reddish-brown eyes and saw the earnest look on his freckled face and the red birthmarks on his temples.  
"Unless we do something," he said, "We're doomed to live in this world."  
"Yea," she said, "G'Kem, I know."  
They walked over to the side of the building where someone had hung a working clock for the new year.  
"A long year 2264 was," she sighed.  
"It wasn't all bad. The year brought the end of the war, and I met you. Well, I met Susan."  
"I suppose so."  
Suddenly, G'Kem gasped and pointed into the starry heavens. "The other part of the time line! The other part! It's as predicted!" he hollered. She looked to where he was pointing.  
She saw one, then three, then a hundred ships flying overhead, bringing a pattern to the sky that wasn't there in the foggy, starless night. The arms of hundreds of ships interlaced in the sky, forming a web of terror over the town. She heard a scream in her mind. The Shadows had come for Earth at last.  
Time ran slowly, every moment filled with terror, in every mind a scream of a Shadow ship, worse than fingernails on a chalkboard. The ships fired upon the ground and buildings erupted into flames. G'Kem pressed his arm around her back and pushed her to the ground, as if that would help.  
How many times had she hit the ground like this?  
How many times had she fallen when she was little?  
How many times had she remembered the ceiling falling and crushing Susan on the White Star?  
Many times.  
How many times had she recalled falling helplessly to the deck of her own ship in a war she should never have been part of? She could almost see it. The injured people, dead people. She could see Susan falling. She was there. On the ship.  
She was aware of people grabbing her, one on each arm and one with his arms over her shoulders. One of them pushed her arms together roughly and slapped handcuffs on.  
"You're coming with us, you damn telekinetic. You're coming with us right now and don't try anything else."  
She had no heart to respond when she realized they were talking to her. 


	3. The Third Side of Life

The Third Side of Life  
  
"Where are you taking me?" she asked as they pulled her roughly down the hallway of the ship. Her ship, if she thought fifth dimensionally.  
"The ship isolation policy doesn't cover the transfer of prisoners of war," one of them said slyly.  
*I didn't do that!* something wailed in her head. *It wasn't me who did that to Susan! It wasn't Caroline Infante-Sheridan, it was Darya Freeman, Amelia Earheart, whatever she calls herself now, but not me! I'm sorry! But it's not my part to apologize. Oh rats...*  
They dragged her to a cell and threw her in. A moment later a woman appeared, grabbed her arm, and injected her with a sleeper. Caroline wasn't too thrilled to imagine what a dose that big would do to someone who had probably never had the drug in her system before.  
"You're not doing anything here," she hissed. The woman shoved her against the wall and stalked out of the cell.  
Caroline, dazed and feeling slightly disoriented from the sleeper, sat down on the floor. She let herself lean over and fall asleep.  
  
When she awoke, she was clearly not on the (her...?) ship anymore. She no longer had handcuffs on. This ship was smaller and had neither Minbari artificial gravity nor a carousel, and she floated in zero-gee. Climbing along a wall, she saw through a window that the ship was in hyperspace. There were several other people swimming around near her, all wearing the rogue telepath patch, like herself. She stared at them silently, and they returned her gaze. She tried to use Darya's telepathy, but she couldn't do it, so it couldn't have been more than a week... a month.  
She couldn't help it. She started crying. She cried because she had ended up here just a minute too late. She cried in realization that Susan would hate her, and that she remembered hating Darya herself. How long would she have to be Darya? Why was she here? She cried for all those who had died in the telepath war on all three sides, and in all wars. She cried because the Shadow war was not over, would never be over, refused to end. It would continue to live in the strange ins and outs of the five common dimensions. She cried for G'Kem. Where was he? Had he switched over as well? She shuddered to think that he had become himself as a boy. She cried for her mother and father, so far away. She cried for herself--the only child in the most famous family on Minbar and in the Alliance, who couldn't even manage to live in the four normal dimensions. She cried just because of the burning sensation in her ears, which was probably from the Sleeper.  
No one in the room said anything.  
  
"It's very simple Ms. Freeman. We want to know what you know. If you don't tell us, we'll just have to get a telepath to scan you. It's a lose/lose situation for you, so you might as well tell us and spare yourself the pain of a scan."  
Caroline strained to see the man standing in the dim light of the interrogation room.  
"I don't know anything," she repeated. What else could she say? It was the truth. "You can scan me all you want. I don't know anything."  
"Very well, as you wish, Ms. Freeman."  
Another man entered the room, as if he had been waiting outside. He would scan her, she knew, and he did.  
She had nothing to hide. She would end up just looking confused, with all her memories overlapping through the five common dimensions and back through time as Susan Ivanova.  
"Sir, she knows nothing," the telepath announced at last. "No more than anyone would. Nothing of value. But there is something else on her mind. She's thinking of Captain Susan Ivanova."  
"Yes. Her. Earthforce has decided to leave the decision of what to do with her for another time."  
"Sirs," Caroline interrupted cautiously.  
"Yes, Ms. Freeman? Have you decided to co-operate?" the interrogator asked, talking down to her.  
She took a deep breath. "Yes sir. I will work for you under one condition."  
"What... condition?" he asked rigidly.  
"I will work for you if you convince Earthforce to let Captain Ivanova keep her command under all circumstances."  
"Funny request given that it was her," the telepath pointed to Caroline, "Who sent Ivanova's fitness to command a starship into question."  
"That will be all Mr. Gray." The interrogator turned to Caroline. "What we do with our officers is none of your concern. We will decide where she stands without your influence."  
"But consider my request," Caroline said, "I'm a strong telekinetic and a P8 telepath. I could be of very good use to you. I know you need more natural telepaths on your side." She hoped she wasn't getting herself into too much. Darya Freeman was a very valuable telepath and telekinetic, but she was not Darya Freeman. Perhaps she could use what Susan knew about telepathy, but telekinesis. well, it wasn't the same thing.  
"Very well. I will discuss it with my superiors as soon as possible."  
He walked militaristically out of the room, leaving the telepath alone with her.  
"I could tell when you scanned me that you're a strong telepath, maybe even a P12. Why aren't you with the Psi Corps?" she asked, knowing that he could ask that same question of her or any rouge telepath.  
"Hah!" Gray laughed. "Damn the Corps and all its cops! I always wanted to serve in Earthforce! Here's my chance."  
She nodded.  
She wasn't handcuffed anymore. She dug around in her pockets for anything to look at in her boredom and to distract her from the anxiety. Her hand fell on a small, metal object. Praying it wasn't anything that would get her in further trouble, she pulled it out cautiously.  
It was a small pin. At first she mistook it for a Starfury pilot's insignia, but at a second look it was clearly something else. Something she recognized from a long time ago. She tried to remember where she had seen it before.  
G'Kem's birthday party. Sophie Ivanova had shown it to her when she was Susan. Maybe Susan hadn't studied American 20th century aviation history too carefully, but Caroline recognized the name. The mystery of Amelia Earheart's airplane had puzzled people for centuries, despite a discovery of what could have been (and most definitely was not, given the circumstances) her airplane, in the late 1990's.  
She held the pin tightly, protecting it almost as if it were an Isil'Zha, a Ranger badge. It was Darya's one link to the Vorlons and back to G'Kem. G'Kem. Caroline's thoughts went back to him. Perhaps he had returned to who he really was. She had nothing to disprove that hope at the moment.  
"You know what? You are weird," Gray said.  
"Don't scan me. Pu-lease."  
"I'm only reading your surface thoughts to make sure you don't try to escape."  
"Where could I go? I don't even know where I am," she grumbled.  
She tried to think of something more normal. She forced herself to think of her home. Where she was Caroline and everyone knew her to be that person. She tried to recite history from the turn of the century on. Then she realized that Gray wouldn't know that history either. She grouched a bit, looking for something else to think about, but at that moment, the people who were holding her decided they needed the interrogation room for something else, and two guards led her out.  
They took her to a cell. She was still worried what they would do with her, who had apparently done something to Captain Ivanova. On the other hand, if they wanted her to work with them, they would have to realized that Ivanova was lucky to be alive and many rouge telepaths weren't that merciful.  
The two guards posted outside her cell didn't seem to be telepaths, or at least they weren't scanning her any more. She was free to let her mind chatter be confusing to someone who didn't know what had happened to her.  
"What do you think is taking them so long?" Caroline asked the man she still didn't know the name of.  
"I don't know," he said, shivering. "Yeesh, it's freezing in here."  
"I don't see why you think it's so cold. I like it."  
The man gave her a dirty look. "It's cold I tell ya."  
It was strange that he would be the one thinking it was cold. Darya was pretty skinny. Maybe she had spent long enough in St. Petersburg in drafty buildings that she wasn't affected by the cold so much. She shrugged and let the man have the last say.  
She had given up trying to figure out her predicament about a year after she became Susan. There was no explaining to why she was ending up as other people she knew.  
Again she remembered what Gari had said: "It's not all lost." After all, it couldn't be all lost if she was here in the time line that she remembered. Or was she? What was real anymore? Had she ever really been Caroline? Perhaps Susan from the alternate time line had simply had a vivid dream about what if the Minbari hadn't conquered Earth?  
Oh well. She pulled a paper napkin out of her pocket. They had let the sleepers wear out, and she had been experimenting with her telepathic and telekinetic abilities. She crumpled up the napkin and placed it on the table.  
She focused all the surrounding object fields around the napkin and it lifted up about a foot. She was getting better at it. She gave the napkin a push higher with a distance swipe of her hand. There was something magical about it all that made her feel special. Susan had no telekinetic abilities and a low teep rating, and Caroline had only a small bit of empathy that she had inherited from her father.  
In a moment of inspiration, she grabbed the napkin with several opposing forces and ripped it to shreds. Darya was a specialist at tearing things, it seemed.  
The man was staring at her, wide eyed.  
*Never seen a teek do her stuff eh?* she thought with satisfaction.  
"You're her, aren't you?"  
"Who?" she asked.  
"I got a portable net link. I check the Earthforce news regularly for anything that might slip out about their war plans. There was an article about Captain Ivanova this week."  
"What's your point?" she shot back.  
"You did a really good job," he said.  
She slammed her head against the wall. She was shocked. This man was congratulating her for what Darya did! Personally saying, "I'm glad you took away Ivanova's freedom of movement. I'm glad you crippled her for the rest of her life."  
"Thanks," she forced herself to say. That simple word. It could have been the worst thing she ever said had she meant it. "Forgive me Susan," she whispered so softly that even she couldn't hear it.  
No, she couldn't take it. She lost it there. She whipped around and shouted, "No! No thanks! Never! How could you like what I did? I won't take what you said! Do you know how much I wish I hadn't done it? I never wanted to!" Caroline didn't care that the man was seeing her cry.  
The man looked up from his net link. "Alright alright. Chill out."  
"You better shut up because I could do it again if I wanted to! Maybe higher up if I wanted to! I bet no on around her cares enough about you to get help before you died of the pain or suffocated or-"  
"Man, I'm beginning to see how a person could get so angry as to do what you did. Try focusing your anger on the Corps."  
"I said shut up!"  
She had never known herself capable of such anger. Still, what was she angry at? The man was only a bit obnoxious. She was angry at Darya, she realized. It would have been easier had she not been Susan in a past lifetime. Much easier if she had never felt Susan's anger as well.  
She tried to calm herself down. She went into a Minbari meditative state. She could almost see Susan's face reflected in someone else's eyes.  
"G'Kem, where are you now?" she whispered.  
A woman in an Earthforce uniform walked in. She handed a transparency to Caroline without seeming to notice her reddened eyes. Through her tears, she saw that her interrogation had gone well, and she had been accepted to spy on the rogue telepaths under heavy watch. One condition on her part: Captain Susan Ivanova keeps her command. Their condition: Darya Freeman co- operates completely.  
*Prophecy attends to itself* she thought *History will attend to itself as well. Susan will keep her command.*  
  
She hadn't done much by the time Earthforce retreated from the war scene. Oh, a spy mission there, a scan there. Nothing much.  
She had been mentally keeping track of Susan. She was probably back on her ship by now. Why had Susan been so eager to leave Minbar? It was such a pretty planet...  
She was homesick, she realized. Up until this point, Minbar hadn't been an easy place to try to get to. In St. Petersburg, it had been 100% impossible. Now, the thought that she was free from Earthforce and could now get back to the planet of her birth made her even more homesick.  
"Please, can I get a ride on your ship?" she asked a Minbari cargo shipper.  
"Why? We are not a passenger ship."  
"Most of the ships going from the Earth colonies to Minbar have been stalled due to the war."  
"Why do you want to go to Minbar?" he asked suspiciously.  
"It's a beautiful place."  
"It is not a tourist attraction either."  
"Oh come on please," she begged. "I love Minbar. It feels like a second home to me." That she said in Minbari. Perhaps that would convince him that she wasn't just a casual traveler. "I'll give you this." She held out Darya's flyer wings.  
"Alright alright. I will give you a ride, but keep your decoration. I have no use for it."  
It was strange to be treated like such an alien. She hadn't gotten a chance to look in a mirror much, and she still was caught up thinking that if she wasn't Susan anymore, then she must be Caroline, who was half Minbari. People had always accepted her as one of them.  
It was good to speak Minbari again. Andronotto was her first language, and she didn't want to forget it. After four years having spoken from her fifth dimensional subconscious knowledge of the Russian language, she had picked up enough into her surface knowledge to be accustomed to speaking it. She wasn't sure, but she thought that she might have a bit of an accent.  
"I leave in three hours. In your own interest I suggest you do not bring anything dangerous," the man said, with a bit of a threatening edge to his voice.  
"This is all I have. Just myself. And thank you again." She waved the greeting sign of the worker caste and climbed into the ship.  
  
It was good to be back in the crystal cities. When the sun broke through the morning fog the light reflected off the tops of the buildings and was split into rainbows. It made her homesick for her parents, whom she would so often see against this kind of background. But she knew she could never see them again until G'Kem made contact with her and invited her to his birthday party in thirty years. How long was thirty years to wait? She had only lived twenty in her life, so she had no way to judge the length of time. Perhaps she would only spend four years as Darya, like she had as Susan. Where would she go after that? Home? Her real home?  
The Minbari weren't too big on carpet, which her parents had always had in their house. The house she had moved into had none. To save some money, she was laying it down herself in the bedroom, which was the smallest room. The rest she would have done professionally.  
At the moment, she was in the living room. She laid the carpet out on the floor. She cut steadily for several minutes. Just as she started on the last side, the carpet cutters snagged on a tough fiber. The cutters slipped and she ended up with a nice bloody gash on her thumb.  
"Yeeesh!" she shouted and ran to the bathroom, dropping the clippers. She washed the cut out at the sink. She was about to get a bandage from the cabinet when something inclined her to stop. She looked at her thumb.  
The blood was already beginning to drip out again. She wondered what would happen if she pushed it back in? She was getting subtle with her object forces. She held the blood with one force current and looked at the rest.  
It came naturally to her, unnaturally easily, like her knowledge of the Russian language. She saw how that cell could fit right there, and that one there. It was like a puzzle, fitting the cells back together. After several minutes of looking at the cellular level, she took a step back.  
It was an obsession started with feeling helpless about what Darya had done to Susan. It was an obsession that she worked on whenever she could. She had tried not to accept that nothing could be done about what had happened. Now, theoretically, possibly... There was a slight hope, a possibility. Something that was even too complicated for modern science to undertake at a scale that the public could benefit from.  
As she took a step back from the cellular level, she saw that she had rewoven the tissue on her finger. She wouldn't have even noticed it had she not been looking so carefully. She pressed it gently. It hurt only a little bit. What had been a deep gash that might have required stitches was only a faint line in her skin. She wondered what else was possible.  
  
The Psi sign was being taken off of the top of the former Psi Corps headquarters in Geneva. Telepaths stood around respectfully at the building as the final symbol of their organization was removed.  
Caroline stood in the crowd, not out of respect, but out of satisfaction. The Psi Corps wasn't fashionable any more. They couldn't keep tabs on the telepaths after all their records were destroyed.  
She was also curious. She was curious about the emotions running through there. A mix of sadness for such a powerful organization at its end, mother and father gone at last, and the joy of being free telepaths. There were some who felt nothing either way.  
Many telepaths still wore the gloves. They did have a practical use after all. Still, that didn't count with those who still wore the psi pin. There always would be those hangers-on to the old tradition, even when the new Psi Corps was founded in 2298, and whose members wore neither gloves nor the pin.  
Even some of those in complete joy over the end of the Corps cried as the head Psi Cops removed their pins and handed them over to the president.  
The ceremony lasted more than two hours. Caroline, who had never had a fondness for speeches, left early. She could still hear the crowd two blocks away where she saw someone standing on the sidewalk, against the wall of a building. Between her fingers she held a gold psi pin. She was crying without tears. She seemed to be having a two-way conversation with herself.  
Caroline dared to listen to her surface thoughts. There was something about this woman that interested her.  
Voice #1: You're dying!  
*Am not.* Voice #2 was a whisper.  
Voice #1: You're dying!  
Voice #2: I can live without you.  
Voice #1: You can never live without Control. You're dead!  
Voice #2: I'll never die before you.  
Voice #1: You're weak, you know.  
Voice #2: You're the one who's dying. The Psi Corps is dead! You're dead!  
The woman caught the pin in her left hand and clenched her fists tightly. Then she threw the pin into her right.  
Voice #1: That's where you're wrong, Talia.  
Voice #2: Then why am I here?!  
Voice #1: How should I know? Why is SHE in here?  
Caroline leaped out of the woman's mind. The woman stared at her for a moment and then went back to debating with herself.  
Voice #1: I feel it now, you're dying.  
Voice #2: Never...  
Voice #3: Both of you! You're acting like children!  
Caroline was startled. Had she said that? She didn't think so.  
Voice #2: Help me!  
Voice #1: Don't listen to her.  
Voice #2: If you care about me, help!  
Voice #1: No! You know she doesn't deserve to live!  
Caroline: Who are you?  
Voice #1: Talia Winters.  
Voice #2: No! I'm the real Talia! Help me!  
Voice #1: Pay no attention to her.  
Voice #3: You know that's not a good answer to "Who are you?"  
Caroline: But it's what I meant. How do you identify yourself? What do people call you?  
That was directed at Voice #3.  
Voice #3: What?  
Caroline: Who?  
Voice #2: You don't know who that is, Caroline?  
Caroline: No, I don't.  
Voice #1: That's so typical.  
Voice #3: You be quiet, Control. By God, you be quiet. To Caroline: I'm sort of Talia's guardian angel.  
Caroline: Okay... huh?  
Voice #1: IT CAN'T BE!  
Voice #2: Look who's scared now.  
Caroline: I still don't understand.  
Voice #2: It's Jason Ironheart!  
Caroline: Who?  
Voice #1: The little weakling has a guardian angel, how sweet.  
Voice #2: You're only saying that because you're scared, and you should be.  
As she stared, Caroline saw the shape of a man standing next to Talia, his hands on her shoulders. This was weird. This was very weird.  
Caroline: If you don't mind, I'll just leave now, I never should have interfered.  
Voice #2: Don't go! I like you!  
Voice #1: Good riddance.  
Ironheart: T(AOL)eeps.  
Caroline: What?  
She was never good at telepathic shorthand.  
Ironheart: Army Of Light Telepaths. Get with them if you want to go home. The--  
She had broken too quickly. Home? What had Ironheart meant? What home? Could he possibly mean back to her family on Minbar in the 24th century? Out of this time?  
She tried to get back in. As strong as a telekinetic as Darya was, she really wasn't such a great telepath. She pushed in.  
Caroline: Tell me more.  
Ironheart: The Army Of Light Telepaths. On Zion.  
Caroline: I've never heard of them.  
Ironheart: That's because you've been living on Minbar when you should have been living on the new telepath home world. You're a telepath, Renla'Ir'Zha, not a Minbari anymore.  
Caroline: Renla'Ir'Zha? Disloyal entertainer of the Shadows?  
Ironheart: They think that you're working for them. You must work around them without them seeing. But you must go. Get to Zion. You'll need the T(AOL)eeps.  
Talia launched herself across the street as she began yelling at Control and back at herself again. The last thing Caroline heard was "Susan! I'm here again! Forgive me, love!"  
Caroline lost her grip again. She stood there for several minutes, until Talia was lost in the crowds of people flooding out from the Psi Corps ceremony.  
It had to be real. What she had been told had not been an invention of her own imagination. Jason Ironheart had been inside Talia. That she knew from god-knows-where, most likely from Susan's memory. In her next off period, when she wasn't busy offering her services as a teek on Minbar, she would go to Zion, and find these Army Of Light Telepaths.  
  
She was getting very disheartened. She had been on Zion for how long had it been? Ten years before she permanently moved to the planet, and another ten after that. She wished she could go back to Minbar, but she was stuck looking for the telepaths that she was looking for. But something would come her way very soon.  
She was walking down the street coming from several errands, her head immersed in the telepathic chatter all around her.  
*Oh yes, it came from that nice little shop on Byron Way, you know the one that's all hip about Hampton-Garibaldi Industries on Mars supporting the Boy Scouts, yes that one.*  
*I told you before, I have an appointment on Monday...*  
*Does anybody know where I can find a bathroom? I really gotta go...*  
*Where do you want to eat? There's an inex(cheap)pensive restaurant near here.*  
She wasn't quite looking where she was going and before she knew it, she had ran into someone.  
"Oh, so sorry!" she said out loud. Suddenly she recognized him. "G'Kem!" It just came out. She shouldn't have said it, but her thoughts had probably betrayed her anyway. She wasn't supposed to know him yet.  
"You know me?" he asked.  
"N*yes*o."  
"You say no but you think yes?" he said politely.  
"I really have to go."  
She was all prepared to run as fast as she could and still look unsuspicious, when a telepathic word sent by G'Kem caught her. It was a cautious test of sorts.  
"What do you mean 'Renla'Ir'Zha'? Where did you hear that?" she demanded.  
"You know it too?" he asked. "You know me and you know that word?"  
*Yes,* she thought.  
*This is horrendous, all this bumping around. We need a password, Caroline, in case this ever happens again.*  
*So where have you been all these years?* 


	4. Selecting Allies

Selecting Allies  
  
"Caroline? Maybe we should go somewhere else."  
"Yeah, I agree. Is this a good time even?" she asked. "I mean are you busy?"  
"Nothing I can't do some other day," he replied.  
She nodded.  
"Gosh, how long have you lived anyway?"  
"Lets see. I've lost track. Sixty-five years as myself, four as Feodor Prozorovsky, twenty as this G'Kem... I'm nearing a hundred!"  
"Well you look great I'll say."  
They laughed.  
"If I don't count Susan in this universe, I've lived fourteen, four, twenty... I'm 48," she said. "I've grown up. I haven't been Caroline since I was fourteen but I've grown up anyway! Caroline has grown up as two other women!"  
"Amazing isn't it," G'Kem said.  
"Maybe we shouldn't talk about this anymore in public," she interrupted.  
"Want to come to my place?"  
"Sure," she said.  
  
"There's something I don't understand, G'Kem."  
"What's that?" he asked.  
"Where's the real G'Kem? You can't be him, even though you look like him."  
"I know. That's what's puzzled me ever since I ended up here. The real G'Kem is living on the other side of Zion. He's here somewhere. I've been trying to avoid being where he is very hard."  
"I don't think there's another Darya because I was there on the ship and I saw what happened to Susan as if I was the one who did it, and everything went... too out there in public to not belong in the real time line."  
"Yet none of this really happened to me, so I have to be a duplicate G'Kem. Gee, I look like myself but I'm not really myself. It's kind of disheartening."  
"Listen, I don't want to interrupt the mood but I think we need to talk about what we're doing here. Why we're skipping around in the five dimensions. Maybe even six dimensions since we're changing bodies," she said.  
"There... is... no... such... thing... as the Army Of Light Telepaths. I've done some pretty in-depth searches, gotten my nose in some pretty secret places," he told her.  
"Me too. I've found nothing either."  
"Then where did the title come from?" he wondered.  
"I don't know."  
"But I do have an idea as to who might be part of it, wherever she is."  
"Who?"  
"I don't know her last name," G'Kem said slowly, "Her first name... what was it? Angie. Maybe also the original G'Kem's kind-of-girlfriend, Ashley Bester. Still I can't risk contacting Ashley without running into my other self in the process."  
"I could do it," Caroline jumped in, "We need time to figure this out before we bring other people into it though."  
"But we only have three years to do that. 2290 is our deadline. That's the year I went back in time to give Susan the extra life energy and the whole thing got started."  
"If we can get hold of this Angie person, we can probably do something. You want to brainstorm?" she suggested.  
"Now?"  
"Yea." She began to pick up his hands to link minds.  
"Uh, Caroline, maybe we could do it the old fashioned way. Talk out loud," he said nervously.  
"Why?" she asked. "It's much slower."  
"I know, I know. I just think that... well I don't know."  
"Well if you want to talk, I'll do that."  
"Good. Thanks."  
She didn't think much of it. People had days in which they didn't want to link minds with anyone. She sighed and leaned back.  
"So where do you think Angie is?"  
"I have no idea. I mean I know where she will be three years from now but she could be anywhere. I mean she might not even be on the planet."  
"Let's assume she is at the moment. If we don't find her on the planet, maybe she's out there somewhere, but for now, let's just hope she's on Zion."  
"Sure," G'Kem said quietly.  
"You don't seem too enthusiastic about all of this," she observed.  
"I--I don't know. I just think that we have the right not to do this. I mean what proof do we have that history can be changed? What if we just did nothing? What would that do?"  
"G'Kem, you know what the deciding factor of the Shadow War is just as well as I do--when and how Ganya Ivanov and in turn Jeffrey Sinclair die. Common sense will tell you that by keeping Ganya from drowning, the time line will be preserved."  
"But Susan already saved Ganya from drowning, and you saw Old St. Petersburg too. Something didn't work. What if that something was what we are going to do?"  
"Or what if we were getting a taste of what would happen if didn't do something?" Caroline argued.  
There was a long silence as if he were running the conflict back and forth through his head.  
"Alright. Fine, we'll figure out where Angie is."  
"I hope you'll work with me, G'Kem. I'd hate to have to do this alone."  
He stood up. "I have to go to the bathroom."  
  
She was supposed to meet Angie a half hour ago. She hadn't shown up. Neither had G'Kem. Perhaps she had gotten the time wrong, or the place. G'Kem had been the one who had gotten hold of her.  
"Caroline!" She turned around. At last.  
"Where is she?"  
"I just got a message from her. She can't come."  
"Why not?"  
"I'm not sure."  
"Did she give any hint?" she asked.  
"I couldn't tell."  
"Did she just decide not to come? Decide she didn't want to get into this?"  
"I don't--I don't know."  
"G'Kem, you're keeping something. What is it? Just tell me."  
"What do you mean?"  
"Look, I've known you for several decades."  
"What are you getting at?" he demanded.  
*Just tell me what it is. You can trust me. We're soul mates. We realized that a long time ago. Remember the night after your fiftieth birthday party? You gave me back Susan's--*  
"Get out of my head!" He began to run.  
She ran after him, but he was faster. She hadn't even been scanning him. She had only been talking on a telepathic level. Why was he so sensitive? Why had he never let her into his mind after the first casual meeting? She gave up and stopped. She wouldn't pry if he didn't want her in his mind.  
Still, it was strange. In their other lives, they had been so close. Why was G'Kem suddenly running away from her? She longed for the olden days before all this began. She had shouted about the night after his birthday party without thinking. That was the night they finally realized what their relationship was. Too bad. Susan died not long after that...  
  
Susan had spent the night at G'Kem's after the party. She hadn't been able to sleep because she kept turning over in her head what G'Kem and she had said at the party.  
*Why didn't you tell me you went back in time?*  
*Because I didn't think you would want to know when you were going to die. Life energy acts strangely when it's not the energy you've had from birth. It doesn't quite fit into your biofunction as naturally. That was why John died so quickly, not as naturally. That'll probably happen to you too. You're not only living on Marcus's life energy, you're living on mine. I only gave you enough to live long enough to save Ganya, and a little longer.*  
*Because I didn't think you would want to know when you were going to die.*  
*Londo Mollari knew when he was going to die.*  
*Whatever.*  
*Oh hell, I'm not going to go to sleep.*  
She had gotten out of bed to find G'Kem sitting on the couch with quarter light.  
"You couldn't sleep either?" she had asked. G'Kem had shook his head slowly.  
They had sat on the couch together. G'Kem had put his arm around Susan. At long last, she had said, "How long did you mean when you said I wasn't going to live much longer?"  
"Not much. Maybe a couple months. I don't know."  
No reply.  
"Isn't it great Susan," he had said quietly, "For so long, you wouldn't let anyone love you. Now look. You have me. You have David and Stephanie. You even have your mother again. You're not going to die alone or unloved."  
"There's only one thing missing."  
"What?"  
She flicked her fingers on her right ear lobe.  
"Oh well. I guess that can't be helped," she had said, laughing quietly.  
"No. Wait a minute, Susan."  
"What?"  
"Through all my career, I've helped people remember their past lives. But up until recently I've never tried to remember any of my own. I think seeing Sophie flipped a switch in my mind. She seemed to know something that I was just discovering, and she gave me this."  
G'Kem pulled off the earring from his one pierced ear. Susan took it from G'Kem.  
"It's a match," she had breathed after she took the earring from her other ear to look at it.  
"Take it."  
"I can't, G'Kem. This earring doesn't have a match anymore."  
"It does Susan. Did you know that souls return to loved ones lifetime after lifetime? I don't know if I really have the right to give this to you, but you can take it if you want to."  
"No wonder you were afraid of Minbari ships when you were little," she had observed.  
  
Caroline fingered her ears. She had them because Susan had, in her will, given "David and Stephanie Infante-Sheridan's unborn daughter" that pair of earrings. Susan in St. Petersburg probably had them from before the war. But how did Darya come to possess them? It was a mystery. She was glad that she had the memory of the party night though. How long they had known each other! They had been Susan and Ganya, Susan and G'Kem, Caroline and G'Kem, Susan and Feodor, and now Darya and G'Kem. Maybe longer before that. What had gone wrong?  
*Where are you, G'Kem?* she thought.  
  
Who could she trust? G'Kem hadn't been acting like himself for weeks, and he wasn't helping much at all. Something was wrong, and if it had to do with their time jumping, then she had the right to know. She was Renla'Ir'Zha. If the fate of the galaxy had been put on her shoulders, she would work with it to the best of her ability.  
She realized that she never exactly knew how strong a telepath G'Kem was. Simple logic would point to him being weaker than her. She, or rather Darya, was his mother. He had gotten his telepathy from her. As far as she knew, she was "full" telepath. He, on the other hand, had inherited the mundane gene from his Narn father as well.  
The question really was: Could she break down his mind blocks?  
  
She invited him to her apartment.  
"Alright, G'Kem. Let's just put this time travel stuff aside for now, not talk about it."  
"Fine with me," he said.  
"But I want to say that... I still care about you, and if there's something wrong, I want to know."  
She took the earring out of her right ear.  
"Are you giving this back to me because you don't believe we're soul mates anymore?"  
"No G'Kem! I'm giving it to you to remind you that we are!"  
"Thanks," he said.  
"I'm beginning to miss being Susan," she admitted.  
"You miss that life she had?"  
"I think so."  
"Who was she?"  
"What do you mean?" Caroline asked.  
"Who was she?"  
"I don't get you. You know who she was. What kind of question is that?"  
"As a Vorlon child, who was she?"  
"A serious 'who'?"  
"I've been wondering for a long time," he said.  
"I think I have an idea."  
Before he could react, she sent a thought to him. It was the most casual of telepathic thoughts. G'Kem might have even mistaken it as one of his own creation, but it was enough. She hadn't meant to. She pulled out something of his, a sloppy accident.  
It was a deep-rooted thing, not a casual passing thought. It brought her chills, and fear, and worry. It was a word. One word. It was "Renla'Ha'Zha". A good example of one would be Mr. Morden. Whoever this man was who was sitting with her in her home, he was not G'Kem, and he was in league with the Shadows.  
  
God, god, Valen. What was that woman's name? She was on her own, working to find people, even though she knew that the Shadows knew she wasn't on their side. What was that woman's name? The one Susan had met near 4-post just before her time jump. If she was working for the One at that time, she might be a good person to hook up with now. Rose... Rosa... Rosanne... Roxanne... Rosanne. Tell... Teller... Tall... Tallman... Tellman. She argued back and forth with herself, wanting to find the right name. She couldn't quite remember.  
She sat down on the couch. She stared at the wall, not blinking. At first it was just a wall. Then she began to see patterns. The room began to glow, and her peripheral vision became clear and in focus. She never blinked once, but she felt no pain. She wasn't looking at anything, yet she could see more than her normal scope of vision, almost 360° around.  
*Talk to her, talk to yourself.* The words her past life coach had told her always to remember came back to her after so many years. *Talk to the one you were. She's still a part of you. Imagine that you are still her.*  
*Susan, who was it? What was her name?* she asked herself. She never actually thought the name "Susan," but rather her personal thought impulse for her. She was so out of practice, she almost had to think to remember it.  
"What is the first thing that comes to mind?" her coach would repeat, again and again.  
Caroline: *Tellman.*  
Susan/Caroline: *Brown haired, looked part Asian possibly, had very light skin like she had been in space for a long time.*  
Caroline: *What else do you remember?*  
Susan/Caroline: *You're not focusing. You've forgotten how to completely believe that you can do this.*  
Caroline: *I was afraid of that.*  
  
"Hello. I'm Caroline Freeman. You don't know me, but when you have the time, I'd like to talk to you. No I'm not trying to sell you anything."  
  
That was the message she sent to Ashley Bester. She thought it best to call herself neither Darya Freeman nor Caroline Sheridan, to stay unconnected with anyone else. G'Kem--the real G'Kem, had often said that Ashley had been a fully active member of the operation that had been doing the time travel business.  
It was weeks before she got a reply. She had been staying at home more, to be able to pick up a call at her terminal.  
"Ashley Bester. I believe that you wanted to talk to me, Ms. Freeman?"  
"Yes," Caroline tried to collect herself. "I do."  
The part of her that was still Susan wanted to scream. Ashley was the spitting image of her father, with her dark hair and thick eyebrows, and the way she showed her teeth when she talked.  
*If you're going to have to work with her, you'd better learn to look at her,* Caroline thought.  
"What I'm going to ask you requires that you just answer my question. I don't think you'll consider this personal."  
"Alright. Shoot."  
"Well, have you ever heard of a group called Army of Light Telepaths or Telepaths on the Side of Light?"  
"Excuse me?" she asked. "I have heard of the Army of Light, but Army of Light Telepaths? No."  
"Renla'Ir'Zha?" Caroline queried. She wasn't about to take Ashley's answer as the truth immediately.  
"Renla'Ir'Zha..." Ashley said thoughtfully, "You do know something. Something."  
"So you do recognize that word? Would you mind telling me where you heard it?" Caroline asked politely.  
"A friend of mine said she had heard it in some sort of dream. We're trying to find out what it means. Could you help us?"  
"I don't know. But I'd like it if we could talk again."  
"Of course. We'd both like to figure out what Renla'Ir'Zha is all about."  
  
"So could you tell me what you know about the word Renla'Ir'Zha?" Ashley asked.  
A flash of Psi Cop Alfred Bester. Flash back to Ashley:  
*Well actually I think it would work better if we work this way.*  
*I wouldn't have expected you to want to have me in your head, Miss used-to-be-Susan-Ivanova.*  
*I can tell you faster this way, and fast is important.*  
*Why?*  
*Flash of what Caroline had learned.*  
*Flash back what Ashley knew.*  
Ashley did know about the Telepaths on the Side of Light. In fact, she was a member of it. She had just been waiting to be sure that Caroline was in the right business.  
Ashley: *The Shadows know about this already? This is bad.*  
Caroline: *I think they do.*  
Caroline: *A memory flash of Susan, Caroline, Susan, Darya.*  
Ashley: *This is a terrible development. What do you suggest?*  
Caroline: *Stick to that G'Kem of yours, and when the time is right (flash of right time), have Juan(Silent One)ita tell him what he needs to do. That's what did happen.*  
Ashley: *We knew there was something we needed to do with the time anomaly. We've already been out there for two years, we were just trying to find what it was.*  
Caroline: *I'm glad I could be of help.*  
Ashley: *You may have just helped us save the galaxy. I won't try to thank you. And I'm sorry about my father.*  
Caroline rolled her eyes.  
  
"You say what?!" Caroline demanded, not meaning to speak out loud.  
*Yes,* Juanita said, *We have reason to believe that you should be the one to do the time traveling. To try to get rid of whatever the Shadows may try to do.*  
*You mean like the Time Tracker, for example?*  
*Exactly.*  
*I have to go to 4-post,* Caroline said to herself.  
*I believe so.*  
  
So she had to go time traveling also. How fun. Why had she been so careless with G'Kem and assuming she could trust him? Maybe if she had never let him in on it, this could be done without the Shadows sending the Time Tracker.  
"Do I get a time stabilizer?" she asked expectantly when she arrived at the listening post on the edge of the time anomaly.  
One of the workers took a small box out of his pocket and opened it up. She took the device from it, and clipped it onto her belt. She had been practicing flying a shuttle for several months now, and was fairly confident that she could get to Earth herself.  
"You won't need this until you get inside 2237 Earth Space," he told her.  
"I know."  
"But take this." That was an order.  
"What is it?"  
It was a light green disk, fairly translucent like sea glass, about half a centimeter thick and five in diameter.  
"It's a Great Machine data crystal with special information on it. It will be absolutely necessary that you keep it with you at all times. Put it in your sealed pocket and lock the zipper."  
She did what she was told.  
"What does it have on it?"  
"It's hard to explain, but you'll know when you get to your destination. Good luck." He smiled and shook her hand. "Good luck."  
"Thanks."  
  
"Ready to jump," she told 4-post as she got to the selected co- ordinates.  
"Confirmed."  
As the mirrored time anomaly opened in front of her shuttle, she felt a sense of deja vu. She remembered Susan's trip with Zathras. That hadn't happened yet, but they were both going to the same coordinates in time. It was a strange thought.  
  
After two hours of thinking something was strange, she finally got to the Earth transfer station and realized it was her hair. She looked at it. It was dark brown instead of Darya's dirty blonde. She was so worried about this development that as soon as she had docked the ship, she ran to a bathroom.  
She pushed open the door nervously. At first she didn't dare look in the mirror. At last she brought up the courage to do so, and when she did, she nearly burst into tears at what she saw. No longer was she Darya Freeman, no longer was she Susan, no longer was she Caroline.  
The face that stared back at her was a familiar one. One she had seen often in the passing. It had dark brown hair and gray eyes. The eyes of a telepath.  
She had become Sophie Ivanova, someone she had never been before. 


	5. Becoming Renla'Ir'Zha

Becoming Renla'Ir'Zha  
  
She knew she had a job to do, but she couldn't tear her eyes from the reflection of what she had become. What did it mean? Was this an accident, or was that what was on the data crystal? It must have been because Susan would never accept that Darya had helped her.  
But now what would happen? If she was Sophie, then where was Darya? Sophie came back to 2298 with Susan, but Darya had also been hanging around as well. She had accepted long ago that she was doomed to change bodies, but she still had the questions.  
She finally managed to leave the mirror. She glanced back a few times, but then she ran back out into the hall. How was she supposed to find the Time Tracker in this crowd? Think. God it was so long ago.  
"Shuttles for Novgorod, Kiev, Jerusalem, Eritrea, Gaborone, and Cape Town leave in fifteen minutes."  
"Where's the Novgorod gate?" she asked an information terminal.  
The computer highlighted a small section of a map it produced, relative to a red dot which was where she was. She dashed in that direction.  
"Excuse me! Excuse me!" She pushed through the crowds until finally she found the Novgorod gate area. Then she saw him. The Time Tracker.  
He looked a bit like a Soul Hunter actually, except that he had a long trail of white hair on his head and a splash of white on his forehead. She walked casually next to him as if she didn't see him, and she doubted that he thought she could. He had a determined look on his face, and he was looking around.  
Suddenly she turned on him.  
"Pain!" she whispered. It was the only way she could fight someone invisible to most people. *Pain!* she said again, testing out the new flavor of someone else's telepathic abilities. Had she still been Darya, she could have given him a lobotomy, but she had to resort to other methods. Now he was kneeling on the floor staring at her. Suddenly with a strength a human couldn't have had under so much pain, he sprung up and knocked her clumsily to the side. She couldn't stop now, even if it meant fighting air.  
She pried deeper into his mind with no direction, only with the intention of going so deep that it would kill him.  
It was an evil mind. There were pits and cracks that you could fall into, things that would jump out of the shadows and grab you. There were places that were sticky. Some places were pitch black, some were of blindingly bright. She could hear a Shadow scream around every corner. Some places were of such a perfect light that it made one terribly uneasy. As she went deeper, the slopes became steeper and the light seemed to change colors. Then she saw a doorway at the end, and ran towards it, knowing that if she touched that door, she would win. She felt a hand reach out to grab her, to prevent her from reaching to door, and it shouted at her. Still she fought on.  
The door grew larger, and she threw herself at it. She bounced off. He was dying. She ran to get out. Like a drowning woman she ran, not to be caught in the door as he died. She could feel more hands on her, but she ran. She felt one brush against her face, and she fell to the ground.  
"Are you alright?" She was wrenched out of the Time Tracker's mind. She opened her eyes and her head spun. When in cleared, she found herself staring into the face of two station security personnel.  
"Just lie there," one of them told her. "We're getting a doctor to find out what happened."  
She was aware of a small crowd of people gathering around her.  
"Excuse me!" the other one next to her said to the crowd. "She just had some kind of seizure; she's going to be alright."  
Caroline didn't care if they looked on or not as long as Susan and Zathras weren't with them. She had gotten rid of the Tracker.  
"Hi, I'm Elliot." The doctor ran a medical scanner over her. "Well whatever happened, it was pretty serious."  
Caroline nodded drowsily.  
"Do you have any kind of epilepsy, Centauri Kelsa, or another related disorder?"  
She shook her head.  
"Are you a telepath or could you possibly be one?"  
She shook her head gravely.  
"Alright. If at all possible I'd like to take you into the clinic for a full examination."  
"I can't," she said. "I need to get somewhere."  
"Are you sure it wouldn't be possible?  
"I'm very sure."  
  
She walked out of small clinic adjacent to the first aid center. She couldn't believe it. She had killed someone. It was for the universe, but she had killed someone. Susan had killed people--the ships she destroyed. Up until now Caroline herself had been clean. Not anymore. It all gave her a headache. Killing to save lives.  
  
She would follow the same path that she knew Susan and Zathras had taken almost an hour ago. The next shuttle to Novgorod wasn't leaving for another hour, and the trains fromm Novgorod to St. Petersburg left frequently, so she didn't have much of a chance of running into them.  
As she boarded the shuttle, having already worked out most of the details of what she was going to do, she began some of the lesser issues. It had been a long time since she had lived in St. Petersburg and she had to review her Russian.  
*Gee you're supposed to be a native speaker.*  
A thought occurred to her. Not only was she supposed to speak Russian better than English, she was supposed to be Susan's mother! It was a very depressing thought. Susan had died thinking that she had been reunited with her mother, when really it seemed, it was actually someone else. But there was nothing she could do except let Susan have the harmless untruth as fact. Caroline remembered how much Susan had wanted to believe that it was Sophie, how hard she had prayed that she wasn't being manipulated. Well she wouldn't let Susan down. She would let the truth die along with Susan if need be.  
She dozed on the train to Gatchina. It wasn't a night's sleep, but it helped to get rid of the headache. *Leave all the hard stuff to your mother,* she thought. When she couldn't sleep anymore, she stared at her body. It was different than the one she had been in so long.  
"The truth is subjective," she said to herself, remembering something that her father David had said to her long ago, quoting his own father.  
  
Zathras and Susan inspected the bank of the river. Caroline hadn't seen her in ages, simply because she would not be a welcome sight. Now she couldn't let herself be seen until after the disaster. That was the right time, not now.  
She sat in the fairy circle of a burnt out tree stump, gazing from a safe distance, her eyes fixed on Susan. Only once or twice did she look at the odd man who was with her. Caroline felt closer to home with her in sight, wherever home was. She longed to run down there right now. She knew she couldn't.  
She spent the next hours waiting in the safety behind the tree wall, running through her mind what would be said when they met, because she knew.  
  
She leaped up. She must have fallen into a light sleep when she heard someone scream. Cautiously, she climbed out of the fairy circle and padded down the easy slope, and as close as she dared get.  
*Telepathy Susotchka!*  
Susan got the idea. Caroline was ready for her. Fortunately, Susan didn't know how to direct, so she was sending the message Caroline's way as well as in the direction of the ranger station.  
*I'll take it!*  
She put a mental tennis racquet in back of the signal and slammed it towards the ranger station, and she followed it, hoping to keep resending the message at closer and closer ranges. It was amazing what a Zion-based telepathy course could do for a person's abilities.  
  
It was agony waiting for Susan to finish up with the other Sophie, but at last she returned to Zathras with a strange report. She was near enough to hear Susan tell the animal-man about the strange thing that happened with her telepathy.  
"You needed a boost, Susotchka," Caroline said quietly, trying out the Russian that she had used so many years before.  
Susan turned her head and stared at her.  
"Oh my god have I left you that long? That is you isn't it?" she cried. She wasn't saying it in the same context, but it was strangely truthful.  
"Yah... how do you know me?" Susan breathed, "You were just back there--"  
"That was me three years ago." Or was it four? Oh dear. She touched her hands to her face, trying to remember. "Oh god, I should have left you later but there was nothing left for me there."  
"What's going on?"  
"I came to this time a month ago. Long enough for the sleepers to wear off." Yea, just improvise. Actually, didn't Sophie say that? She thought so.  
"Momma what are you talking about?" Susan asked again. Caroline could see her eyes praying for it to be real.  
"You didn't notice? My self from this time scanned you back there. She knows you needed help in contacting the ranger station." How perfect.  
"But... what? Who are you?"  
"You never really saw me die did you? I'd be a bit concerned if you did. I'm the first human to time travel. You were just a child a month ago, to me." Andrei let Sophie's ashes be caught by the wind over the Gulf of Finland. She didn't have a burial place that Susan could have seen as a child.  
"Is that really you Momma?"  
"What else can I do to prove it?" She hadn't said yes exactly.  
Caroline knelt down beside Susan. When they touched minds, Caroline didn't worry that Susan would see anything. The warmth and love were real to both of them. Caroline forgot the headache that she had gotten from all the telepathic strains of the day.  
Sophie wouldn't know what Darya had done. "What happened to you?"  
They sat on the ground together and Caroline felt closer to home than she had felt in years. With Susan she felt that she was still part of normal history to some degree, and not just a working observer. And she was with herself. She was both of them, and had been both of them when she had been Susan, and they would both be when this Susan was herself.  
"Everything," she stated coldly.  
"Oh... I wouldn't know..." She wouldn't have. "So much must have happened in your life. Your whole life that's happened in the month that I was here." (The years I was Darya...) "And I wasn't with you to watch you grow up." (I've missed you so much Susan. That's real.)  
"I wish I could be ten years old again, and you could start again where you left off."  
"Well, time is a strange thing, Susotchka, you never know." 


	6. To Come Full Circle

To Come Full Circle  
  
She felt that at last she had been given a reward for her hard work. To have Susan speak to her was such a joy after years of knowing what hate she had for Darya would be taken out on her as she occupied Darya's body. She now felt as if a mirror had been turned on her. She was no longer Darya, but the one person in the world that Susan would pray that she was really with. Caroline knew how much this meant to her. After a lifetime of losses she doubted that Susan would have given any thought to having her mother back. Now, there was no way she would shatter the woman's good fortune with an unnecessary truth. After all, they were the same person on a cosmic scale.  
There were some Russian words that she either had never learned or forgotten. It didn't matter though. She knew history after Sophie's suicide even if Sophie wouldn't have known. Other words she could easily guess. She sat there for nearly an hour while Susan talked. She tried to react like it was the first time she had heard that history.  
When Susan had finished, they sat in silence for several minutes, taking in the events of the day. Eventually, Caroline unbuckled her straps and floated over to Susan. She couldn't resist. She gave her a big hug. Susan accepted it. Perhaps Zathras was feeling a bit left out, but heck, she didn't really care. She thought she heard Susan still praying for it to be real.  
Then Caroline began to worry. What if she became Darya again when they passed through the time anomaly? No, she wasn't thinking logically. She couldn't become Darya again because her mother had stayed her mother for as long as Susan lived.  
She chewed her nail. (Sophie's were already ragged and torn, so she didn't think she would be doing something unusual.) Susan wouldn't be living so long. Just past G'Kem's birthday party. Well, at least she knew where Susan would go: she would go to Caroline.  
She smiled, remembering wondering if she had a human or Minbari soul; which she would be reborn as. As it turned out, a little of both!  
Suddenly she remembered something.  
"If I was met by one of your brothers on Earth, how did they know to come? I was getting worried that I wouldn't be able to do anything about what I knew," she asked.  
"When Jeff went back in time at least he had what Valen had written. We don't have anything," said Susan. "We'll just have to improvise."  
"Zathras can contact Epsilon 3. Tell brothers what to do."  
"Do that then," Susan agreed.  
"Zathras set up communication. Will send it when we get to time anomaly."  
"That should be in about a half hour."  
Maybe that was how Epsilon 3 had been prepared to assist the T(AOL)eeps with her time jump. Better send the message.  
  
Oh gee! G'Kem found his mother! As much as Caroline had known he would, she was startled at the realization that Darya was out there again, as herself, and that she, Caroline, had changed over once more. She was pretty sure that it was a real deal. She had taken the green data disk out of her pocket for several hours when she was alone, and she had remained Sophie.  
She dreaded at looked forward to the party at the same time. Darya was already there when she and Susan arrived. Caroline couldn't keep her eyes off of the woman, while Susan immediately refused to look at her or acknowledge her presence.  
The doorbell rang once again. She could feel her heart begin to pound. She stepped over to the far side of the living room.  
"Well hello!" she heard G'Kem say as he opened the door. Caroline felt sick. It was her parents. David and Stephanie Infante-Sheridan. Strangers she hadn't seen in decades.  
*No, they don't see you as their daughter. They see you as a stranger that G'Kem knows through Susan.* She saw that her mother was pregnant with her. Just three weeks before due date in fact, just two and a half before she was actually born. By that time Susan would have died. A sudden death it was. She looked fine now, and she was. Her body wasn't planning ahead for death; wouldn't realize it was supposed to die soon until the time was on top of it. That was a characteristic of living on someone else's life energy. Like a star that burns too quickly and goes out suddenly.  
Caroline slunk around for a while, observing Darya and her parents. Other guests arrived. Some she didn't know, and they must have been other friends of G'Kem's.  
*Oh come on Sophie you're breaking up the pattern!* someone said to her telepathically.  
She jumped. Laughter followed. G'Kem walked up to her and smiled.  
"They mean the telepathic pattern in the room. It's common on Zion to weave a pattern at social gatherings, where each mind interacts with others in a certain way."  
Sophie wouldn't have known that, so she nodded. Actually telepaths did it on every human planet. It had become a way of making sure no one felt left out. She didn't bother to worry about what disturbance her parents and Delenn were causing, them not being telepaths at all.  
"I didn't know Susan had a daughter." Caroline looked up. It was Darya.  
"Oh you didn't?"  
Darya shook her head.  
"It's a long story," Caroline said. Actually she wasn't sure how it came to pass that Susan had a daughter. They had never actually figured out the details of the explanation of who Sophie was. She couldn't be Susan's mother, after all, being around 30 years younger than Susan. She changed the subject. "That's a nice pin there." She gestured to the flyer wings that Darya wore on her lapel.  
"Thanks."  
"What is it?"  
"Flyer wings. My own."  
*Exchange of details.*  
"I had heard you were with the Vorlons," Caroline said.  
"Seems that G'Kem has told you a lot then."  
"Oh, through Susan, that sort of thing."  
Darya frowned at the mention of Susan.  
"Susan. She hates me."  
"A part of her doesn't hate you as much as you might think." (That part is me.)  
"I guess we both wish we'd never met. Oh why am I telling you all about this? I hardly know you."  
"It's alright," Caroline said. "I know all about it. Would you mind if I showed this to Susan?" she gestured at the flyer pin.  
"Oh not at all. Why?"  
"Oh I don't know. It might interest her."  
"Sure." Darya handed Caroline the pin. She found Susan on the other side of the living room, obsessively clipping her finger nails.  
"Susan, I was talking to Darya."  
"You were? Great, now you're socializing with her. What a creep."  
"I just found out something really fascinating about her." Like you would really be interested.  
"Uh-hu," Susan said.  
"It's the reason she was with the Vorlons. She was one of the people that they abducted and kept until the 'time was right.' They gave her telepathy and telekinesis. She wasn't with the Vorlons for a couple of years, and she met G'Kem's father on Narn. She ended up getting pregnant but was called back by the Vorlons. When they went beyond the Rim, she was separated from G'Kem. But the interesting thing is this."  
Caroline showed her the pin.  
"American 20th century flyer wings. Model for the Earthforce shoulder patch. Where'd she get these?"  
"They're hers," Caroline replied.  
"Amelia Earhart. That's not her name on it."  
"No one on Earth had her name on file and she started calling herself Darya Freeman."  
"Alright, but what's the big deal with this?" Susan was not getting it, and who would?  
"She was a pilot. In 1937, she attempted to fly around the world but somewhere over the Pacific Ocean, the Vorlons got her airplane."  
"Good for her."  
"I just find that really fascinating. A living person from the 20th century," she said. She really should have been an actress.  
"If it was anyone else, I'd go up and shake their hand. Her, I don't care."  
"Come on, Susan!" She knew it wouldn't do any good.  
"She shouldn't be here."  
"Don't say that so loud." It really didn't matter. Caroline knew that Darya knew that Susan wanted nothing to do with her.  
"I don't care," Susan mumbled. "I want to go ask G'Kem something," she said.  
*Hey, go on,* she thought with satisfaction. She ran back over to Darya, dropped the pin in her hand, thanking her.  
Susan and G'Kem were now in the kitchen doorway. They talked. They discussed what they had always discussed. At last they stopped and Caroline was able to catch G'Kem's attention.  
*I'd like to talk to you G'Kem.*  
*Alright.*  
*Outside.*  
G'Kem followed her into the apartment house hallway, out of the crowd.  
*I know you've been remembering your own past lives, G'Kem (flash of Ganya).*  
*I know. I've had thoughts about that for a while now, ever since I saw you it was like a memory that I shouldn't have forgotten. You looked so familiar to me.*  
*Susan has me now, also, but there's something else I want done.*  
*What's that?* G'Kem asked.  
She still had the earrings. As Caroline, as Susan, as Darya, and now as Sophie. Whatever magic had allowed her to become all those people had allowed her to keep them.  
*If you remember, give this to Susan.* She took out one of the earrings.  
G'Kem looked at it for a very long time and then his eyes returned to her.  
*I don't quite remember, but I sort of do.*  
*Take it and look at it for a while, and you will,* she told him. She knew he would. Then she changed the subject to another important one.  
*I'm staying here for several days, and I know Susan is too. We both know she's going to die very soon. I don't want to be on another planet when she does.*  
*That would be a good idea to stay as close to her as possible for a time.*  
  
Despite G'Kem's suggestions, she didn't stay with him for the next days. She left him and Susan to be alone and figure out where their spirits stood in the whole scope of things. G'Kem had once told her when she was Caroline that Susan died four days after the party. Those four days seemed endless to her now, as she expected and yet dreaded G'Kem calling her to say that she was dying. She had given him the ID of the comm terminal at the motel.  
On the fourth day she was paged from the front desk. She ran down there and took the call on an earphone only.  
"Sophie. I guess you expected it but... well Susan is dying. I think someone picked up on my thoughts and called a doctor, but there really isn't anything that can be done... I mean it might get into the record books as 'first death by old age alone'... but nothing can be done except for you to get over here." She heard him sniffle slightly.  
"I'm coming over!"  
She pulled the earphone out of her ear and told the person at the desk that she really had to go. Then she ran out the door. G'Kem's building was only a couple of blocks away, so she arrived on foot. There were a couple of neighbors standing near his apartment. One thing telepaths could be noted for was their sense of family, even when it was among strangers.  
Her heart was pounding as she pushed the cracked front door open and let herself in. G'Kem met her and grabbed both of her hands.  
"I'm glad you got here as quickly as you did... Susan wants to see you."  
G'Kem pulled her into the bedroom.  
"Momma!" she heard Susan say. Caroline ran over to her. She dropped to her knees at Susan's deathbed. With her right hand she held Susan's left. She put her other arm across and put her hand on Susan's shoulder. G'Kem knelt next to her.  
*If this had happened thirty years ago, I wouldn't have either of you. We wouldn't even have saved Ganya together.*  
*I know Susotchka.*  
*I guess Marcus did more than he was trying to do.*  
Caroline smiled.  
*Momma, it's strange. I don't feel like I'm dying. I feel more... alive... than I have in a long time.*  
*Maybe you're being reborn.*  
  
She knew the instant Susan died. She had been in the mind of the Time Tracker when he had died, and now she was in Susan's. But unlike the Tracker's mind, she didn't feel a bit of herself leaving as well. She felt all of it grow distant. She felt almost as if her and Susan's mind were merging, and they were both being reborn. She could feel herself lying where Susan was, and she could feel Susan kneeling in her place. Once again she was lying in bed, but it was not daytime. Susan died in the daytime. Now it was night. Moonlight was coming through the window. She sat up in bed and pulled herself up to the window sill.  
Outside lay many miles of city, tall buildings. And before her eyes, she saw the buildings change from Zion to the crystal towers of Minbar.  
She turned from the window and saw a child's room. A room that she hadn't seen in so long. She climbed off of the bed and felt the floor beneath her. Like there always had been, there was nothing on it, no clutter. She turned on the light. She saw the drawings she had done as a child, and all her books and toys, long forgotten. She saw a crib in the corner near the closet. She walked over to it. In it lay sleeping her baby brother Jason. She had forgotten about him as well.  
She looked in the mirror and saw herself with her light brown hair, and her half Minbari head crest. She wasn't full human anymore. G'Kem knew her, but as a relative. He knew they were soul mates, but she could feel the connection was gone now that she was once again Caroline. This wouldn't do.  
She spent the whole night writing out what she remembered. She described Susan, Gari, and Feodor. She described Darya and Sophie. She described her life. What she had become. And she knew she could never grow up again. She could never learn to be fourteen again. She wouldn't try because she had already lived a full life.  
"Make your parents proud, Jason," she whispered.  
Just as morning was lighting the sky, she looked out the window once more. The mornings were dazzling on Minbar as the crystal buildings created rainbows through the sky. She took a deep breath and held the image in her mind and she lay down on her bed.  
She went into a deep Minbari meditation. It wasn't something she was supposed to know how to do yet. Something a fourteen year old would not have been told. It was so deep that she couldn't have come out of it--even had she wanted to. 


End file.
